Having given up the academic archaeology rat race I have recently joined up with a couple of exciting travel website developers, Pauline Kenny and Steve Cohen. These are the people that created SlowTrav, which they recently sold, and SlowEurope; both highly successful travel websites. We have combined our respective talents and created Archaeology Travel, an extensive and interactive travel guide to archaeological sites and museums. On 30 June 2011 we launched France, and today to support the Day of Archaeology initiative we are preparing to go live with the ‘England’ section of our website. Soon, we will be adding Italy, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

A little bit about Archaeology Travel. From the country-level page (as in France shown above) visitors can choose a region on an interactive map, or choose a region from the list in the navigation bar to the left. Clicking through takes you to our recommended list of sites and museums, organised by archaeological period (below is the page for Paris and Ile de France). Each entry on the list has a brief description and a photograph. Clicking through takes you to a dedicated site page, where you will find more archaeological information about the site, the necessary details you require should you want to visit the site, links to further photos, as well as a link to an official website.We have added, and are still adding so much more to ensure that Archaeology Travel is not just a set of regional lists of archaeological sites and museums open to the public. Besides a number of pages presenting resources and background information about archaeology (and more to follow), a blog with news, reviews and travel reports, the website also provides in its ‘Archaeological Tours’ feature a grouping of sites by specific themes. So for anyone who wishes to travel Europe by visiting, for example, the amphitheatres of the Roman Empire or the Megalithic monuments, Archaeology Travel directs you to the sites you will want to see.

For our Day of Archaeology, we will be making the necessary changes to the website to include England: Pauline and Steve will be attending to the technical aspects of this change for the website, while I shall be adding as many sites as possible. We will not have all the archaeological sites and museums listed today, that will be an ongoing process; but we want to get the England section live today to how the diversity of archaeological work. I shall report back on our progress at the end of the day.